Previews

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

We talk to id Software and Splash Damage for new info on the upcoming Enemy Territory sequel.

Spiffy:

Same great Enemy Territory gameplay; huge new environments, new vehicles and fantastic graphics.

Iffy:

Still plenty of unknowns, from level balancing to hardware requirements.

One of the best surprises of 2005 was the announcement of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. As a "prequel" of sorts to Quake 2 and 4, this new multiplayer-only title would bring the successful formula of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory from WWII to the near future, pitting the best of Earth's military forces against the invading Strogg army. An all-gameplay trailer unveiled at last year's E3 expo was a huge hit, showing huge Battlefield 2-sized environments and a spectacular graphics engine, and after many months, the teams at Splash Damage and id Software are finally opening up with more details about the title.

The evolution of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has been a strange one. The original Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was conceived as a mission pack with both single-player campaign multiplayer components, but was eventually cancelled. The multiplayer was completed and released as a free standalone game with 6 maps, and became a huge hit -- nearly three years after its release, it's still one of the most popular online shooters going, ranking in the top five alongside the Counter-Strikes, Battlefields and Call of Duty games.

With that in mind, the core formula for Quake Wars is still essentially the same as Enemy Territory: each multiplayer map is objective-driven, each with its own storyline -- as Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood explained, the levels would represent key historic battles in the future Strogg invasion of Earth, such as the GDF gaining access to the Strogg slipgate technology, facilitating Earth's counterattack on Stroggos in Quake 2 and 4. According to id Software's Kevin Cloud, a final number of maps hasn't been set in stone, but the team currently has 12 maps in production -- double that of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

The other key element that's being retained is the ability to choose from 5 or 6 different classes on each side, from your standard soldier to an engineer or medic class. The GDF side has a familiar militaristic feel to it: medics can revive soldiers who have fallen in the battlefield, engineers can deploy radar units and fix vehicles, and rangers are covert ops specialists who can snipe from afar and hack into Strogg units. While the Strogg forces will have corresponding roles (an assault class, an engineer class, infiltrator, etc), the factions won't merely be carbon copies of each other -- they'll have different abilities and deployables that change how they're played. The Strogg medic, for example -- the MediTek -- can create new spawn points for teammates out of dead GDF soldiers. And like Enemy Territory, Quake Wars will have 3-map campaigns where player stats carry over from one level to the next, including bonuses for actions that help your team. (According to Cloud, there's also talk about having persistent stats tracking a la Battlefield 2, but firm details on that will have to wait for another day.)

There are plenty of big changes and additions in store for Quake Wars, however. Enemy Territory was very much an infantry-focused game -- any vehicles, like the tank in "Gold Rush" or the train in "Rail Gun" were bolted down and could only move along a pre-scripted path. Quake Wars takes a step towards the Battlefield games in this regard, with huge open environments and an army of land and air vehicles that will let you go anywhere. The GDF side will have the core vehicles you'd expect -- a one-man quad bike, a lightly armed 3-man jeep, an APC, a tank, and a hover copter with room for a pilot and gunner. The Strogg side has some more interesing unites, like a heavy mech walker that can aim in 360 degrees independent of movement, and a hornet flyer with some advanced aerial capabilities. According to Wedgwood, the goal with the air vehicles is to make them easy for anyone to get in and use, but should still have some nice tricks to reward skilled pilots.

Interestingly, the technology powering Quake Wars shares very little with Quake 4, released just a few months ago. Although both started out based on id Software's DOOM 3 engine, the two games were developed independent of each other and Quake Wars features its own specially-designed systems for physics, networking and outdoor rendering. The team is especially excited about the "megatexture," -- a new system developed by John Carmack that allows the team to build a 32000x32000 pixel image that covers the entire map, and allows the designers to set variables like traction or sound when moving over different types of terrain. Does this make for a better, easier-to-program, more hardware-friendly game? Hells if we know -- for the moment, we can just look at the seven new screenshots released for the game and drool, thinking about the great 12x12 battles that might be awaiting us.

As is customary for any id Software production, no official release date has been set for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars beyond "2006." There's also no official word on a beta or pre-release demo, but if we had to lay odds, we'd expect to see some sort of public demo before the game's release. We're eager to get our hands on Quake Wars for ourselves -- we'll have more info on the game's progress in the coming weeks.